Everyone Needs To Understand These Media Trading Models (But Few Do)

“Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Amihai Ulman, founder and chief operating officer at Mass Exchange.

I have a confession to make: Before writing this, I couldn’t really say that I, or anyone I know in ad tech, fully understood how different ways to trade media compared with each other.

There are all these different ways that technology brings buyers and sellers together to trade media. This stuff is so confusing and hard to wrap your mind around that I never really felt like I had a solid grip on it.

Buyers and sellers choose the trading models they want to use based on their objectives, technology and access to data. Each media trading model fills a niche in our ecosystem. Understanding the different media buying models is not about picking winners or declaring one better than another. That is up to you, given your business needs.

I set out to map these media trading models so that everyone can pick what works best for them and have a far better understanding of what is going on. To understand the different types of media trading models, I spent a few days talking to folks throughout the industry, which made it clear that it was time to decipher this enigma.

I decided to focus the comparison on three areas of a transaction where key business decisions are made by buyers and sellers. These are the handling of inventory before the trade, managing of the negotiation and how the deal’s final price is determined. The outcome of the effort to understand media trading models resulted in a visual landscape for media trading models that I call a “Media Tradescape.”

I designed it to compare 10 key areas where we can differentiate each of the nine trading models used in display media; I give more detail on each trading model below the tradescape. I’ve also included a breakdown of each trading model with corresponding characteristics as part of my “Table of Trading Models.”

What did I learn from my investigation? There is significant upward price pressure from demand within media trading environments. Since the advent of real-time bidding, an increasing number of media trading models have risen to allow buyers to access inventory at increasingly higher prices. Trading models developed in the last couple of years focused on unlocking trades for more effective and higher-quality inventory, at higher prices. The environment for transacting high-quality and high price-point inventory via technology is very much in flux.

You can view a larger version of the "Media Tradescape" here or download a PDF version here.

Inventory priority: The ability to guarantee inventory amount and price to a seller. Some models focus on reserved inventory, others on unreserved and some on both.

Inventory allocation: The way in which supply is allocated to demand. Once an impression is received by the publisher's ad server it attempts to allocate the supply to demand, based on the outcome of its yield optimization. If no desirable outcome is found by yield optimization, an outside auction is used to determine the outcome.

Inventory units: The definition of what is supplied and demanded. Units of audience are a mix representing all of the consumers of the supplied media, and “impressions” are units of supply that all share a common set of attributes.

Inventory targeting: The ability to apply granular definitions to the supply using a specific set of agreed-upon attributes. Some trading models enable targeting definitions from the supply side or enable use of definitions from the demand side, while others enable both definitions for filtering.

Pricing model: The units of price used by buyers and sellers. Most trading models are based on CPM pricing, while two support multiple pricing models, including CPM, CPC and CPA.

Seller offers: The ways in which supply is represented in each trading model. Some use hidden floors in an auction to set the lowest price a seller will accept. Others use a set of rules to represent offers to buyers and some use manual processes to set the sell offers used for trading.

Buyer bids: The ways in which demand is represented in each trading model. Trading models can be divided into environments where buyers can bid or buy using a take-it-or-leave-it price. Rules-based bidding allows buyers to set the price at which they are willing to purchase the supply. No-bidding environments provide an ecommercelike experience where buyers can only buy at the offered price.

Negotiation: The ability to consider both the seller’s offer price and buyer’s bids in determining the clearing price. Some models do not account for any negotiation since the price is determined manually by humans before technology is involved. Other trading models support a negotiation and the final price is determined by a technology.

Deal priced by: The layer of technology that determines the clearing price. Regardless of how the negotiation occurred, the final price at which each impression clears is either determined by the publisher's ad server, or that decision is outsourced to a technology outside the publisher's ad server.

This is my interpretation of the landscape of media trading models. I want to have a shared understanding of these trading models so let’s have a conversation. Please add your perspective to our shared understanding of the space. I and many others would be very happy if we could clear this up.

Below is the "Table of Trading Models," which breaks down this information by trading model. You can view a larger version here or download a PDF version here.